


nottivago

by viscrael



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (at the end) - Freeform, ??? idk what this is, Canon Timeline, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, POV Keith (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 09:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8440336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscrael/pseuds/viscrael
Summary: (n.): of a person who wanders at night; night-roamer.

 He wanted to say suddenly that he remembered Lance, but only once. Only from disappearing limbs down a hallway, and he wanted to say that it was too similar to now, that it hit too close to home. Keith had been able to distance himself from the fact that they had shared history—not purposefully, but Keith had put that distance there anyway. But with that memory so parallel to the ones from the past weeks, it was difficult to ignore.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i dont know what this is honestly i just liked the idea of lance sneakin arnd the castle late at night when he doesnt feel well or misses home and then eventually having it become his and keiths Alone Time
> 
> this started out as a 5+1 thing but ended up as. w/e the heck this is
> 
> i just rlly like klance ok

Keith couldn’t remember it very well, but once, back when he was still at the Garrison, before Shiro’s mission and his dropping out and Voltron, he was out of his dorms past curfew. It wasn’t that it was particularly _hard_ to sneak out—kids did it all the time. It was only a matter of how much you wanted to risk getting caught.

Keith hadn’t cared much about getting caught. That hadn’t been his main issue. He was coming back to his dorm late after staying out too long training with Shiro, and he’d just snuck past one of his professors when he saw a flash of something in the corner of his eye. When he turned, it was a kid from his class surreptitiously making his way around the hallway, clearly trying to sneak out. He was scrawny, all limbs and too much ego, and Keith couldn’t remember much about him other than that. He’d never cared to.

 

\--

 

Shiro stood watching the sun rise that night—the night after they got him back. Keith set a hand on his shoulder and tried not to think about what just happened. Everyone else was inside Keith’s makeshift home, waiting for them, but they stayed out a little longer than they needed to.

Keith could feel someone watching from behind them, silently. But he never turned around.

 

\--

 

The name actually _did_ ring a bell; it just took some prompting.

Keith played it off like he hadn’t remembered, and that was mostly true. He remembered very few people from the Garrison, because very few people had seemed worthy of remembering. Keith didn’t mean it to be rude or inconsiderate—he had just spent most of his time at the Garrison away from others, by himself or only with Shiro, focused on his grades and what he hoped was his budding career as a pilot. He’d been too distracted to go out or make genuine friends. And even when he had Shiro, he was more of a mentor, more of a brother. Keith had never had the social life he knew was expected of him, and he was fine with that. It didn’t matter.

But he remembered Lance, sort of—from that time in the hallway. Keith didn’t know why that stuck out so vividly in his memory, but once he’d remembered, that was all he could think about.

It was stupid. Keith knew it was stupid. He tried to forget about it.

 

\--

 

The castle was larger than any of the paladins expected, and even after a few months in space, it was difficult to believe that it was their home now. That something so vast and foreign was the closest thing they had to a home out here. That they were billions of light years away from Earth and getting farther away by the second, and that the only thing connecting them to that was this castle and themselves.

Keith hated the nights more than anything else, mostly because there _were_ no nights. All sense of day and night was misconstrued out here, everything arbitrary, on their own times, and while they’d listened to their bodies’ clocks originally, they become more unreliable as time wore on and the gravity of their situation hit them. And because Keith had never been good at taking care of himself—not when he was kid, not at the Garrison, and certainly not now—he stayed up hours past what everyone else had considered “bed time” more on accident than not. He’d get so engrossed in training that he’d forget, and by the time he was done showering and heading back to his room, the lights would be shut off and everything dead silent.

That was the second thing he hated the most. The silence. Space was so _vastly_ silent. All sci-fi movies had lied; there were no explosions out here. There was no screaming, no voice, no sound. Nothing for it to travel through. And when the castle wasn’t bumping with life, it shut down, like a robot with its switch flipped. Only two settings.

Keith had never had an issue with silence before he became a paladin. Silence had become his friend, his confidant, his safety net. He’d grown to like it, appreciate its nuances and its safety and its consistency. If you spent enough time alone, you tended to do that.

But then Voltron happened and suddenly he couldn’t stand it. That was one good part of living in close quarters with six other people: things were never quiet. The castle was always alive, always loud.

Except for now.

So Keith walked back to his room in silence, acutely aware of how damp his hair still was, the way his shirt clung to his body from his shower, the sound his bare feet made against the cold flooring as he moved. Then there was something in the corner of his eye, and when Keith chased it, he found a door open leading to the deck.

Lance was sitting in front of the window, just looking. He only sat, only stared: so entranced in whatever it was he was seeing—whatever he could find other than the vastness of space—that he didn’t noticed Keith standing in the entrance. Keith wondered if he knew what time it was, then thought that was a stupid thing to think; of course he knew. That was probably why he came. So he wouldn’t be disturbed.

Keith stood there watching for a few minutes, keeping himself safely hidden from Lance’s immediate line of sight. He wasn’t ashamed or afraid to talk to Lance, Keith assured himself—he just. Didn’t have the energy to interact with anyone right now, especially not _Lance_. That was all. He’d see him in the morning.

He turned around and started back to his room.

 

\--

 

Lance was back there a week later. Keith pretended not to notice.

 

\--

 

The third time it happened, Keith was caught.

“Did you really not remember me?”

Lance asked it at the same moment that he turned around, making eye contact with Keith and not backing away. Lance was always like that—keeping eye contact, meeting someone head on no matter what. Keith didn’t avoid it, but that had been something he struggled with, before he learned not to care so much. He wondered if Lance had cared, and if that was why he tried so hard now.

“What?”

Keith couldn’t come up with a better answer than that. He still stood in the entrance, like a deer caught in headlights, not moving. Lance turned back around. He patted the spot on the floor next to him.

“You might as well come sit with me,” he said. Keith had hundreds of reasons to say no, but in the moment, he could think of none of them. He sat.

“You come out here every night,” Keith said. It was meant as a question, but his voice refused to raise.

“Eh, not _every_ night. Just…sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

He grinned, but it was sheepish. “A few times a week, I guess. Not that it’s super easy to keep track of weeks out here, but.”

Lance seemed to come back to some thought then, sobering him, and Keith wished that he wouldn’t. “Oh.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“What question?”

“Did you really not remember me? You know, from the Garrison?”

Keith looked at Lance, and they stayed looking at each other. He tried to find something in Lance’s expression that would tell him what the right answer was supposed to be, if there even was one—but he couldn’t figure it out quick enough. The silence dragged on. He said, “I remembered you after you told me your name.”

“But not before.”

“I didn’t remember a lot of people from there. It wasn’t just you.”

Finally, Lance looked away. “Guess I shouldn’t take it too personally, then.” He said it like he was joking, but he still wasn’t looking at Keith.

Keith didn’t know how to make the situation better. What had he been supposed to say? That of course he remembered Lance? Lance, who never spoke to him except in occasional declarations of rivalry, whose only interaction with Keith was glaring across the classroom and that one time in the hallway? There was a year between Keith’s dropping out and meeting Lance again. Wasn’t it reasonable to say that he— _forgot_?

Lance didn’t forget. Keith wasn’t sure if he was supposed to feel flattered by that or not.

He wanted to say suddenly that he remembered him, but only once. Only from disappearing limbs down a hallway, and he wanted to say that it was too similar to now, that it hit too close to home. Keith had been able to distance himself from the fact that they had shared history—not purposefully, but Keith had put that distance there anyway. But with that memory so parallel to the ones from the past weeks, it was difficult to ignore.

After a while, Lance stood up, brushing invisible dirt off his knees and offered a hand to Keith. Keith didn’t hesitate before taking it. He wanted to say, _look, I know you now; I trust you now, shouldn’t that matter more than before?_ But he didn’t.

Lance called a good night before he disappeared into his room, and Keith’s response felt weak in comparison to what he wanted to say.

 

\--

 

The next week, Keith met Lance there. Neither of them brought their previous conversation up, but Keith could tell that it was there, around them, in a space neither wanted to touch or handle because it would require too much care. Keith had found that it was very difficult to be careful as a paladin.

 

\--

 

Keith showed up first, once.

He didn’t know what compelled him to, but he found himself ending training early, taking a quicker shower, speeding down the hallway before he ended up on the deck. The window took up the whole wall, heavy glass that Keith knew wouldn’t shatter. He was hesitant to touch it anyway. Everything outside their castle was so huge.

He heard rather than saw Lance enter. There was the footsteps, then the moment where they stopped, just at the entrance, just a falter—then they were coming towards him again, and Lance sat down next to him on the floor.

“You’re here early,” Lance said. It was the first time either of them had explicitly mentioned that these meetings were intentional.

“I didn’t feel like training any longer today.” Keith shrugged. His hair was still damp, shoved in a ponytail at the nap of his neck. The few stray water droplets that hadn’t been shaken out gathered at the end of his ponytail, dripping onto his back. Keith thought he saw Lance watching a droplet’s descent. He didn’t say anything about it.

“Who are you and what’ve you done with Keith?”

Keith nudged Lance’s shoulder in what he hoped was a friendly way. Friends did that, right? Nudged each other when they were being annoying or teasing them. Friends probably didn’t linger on it so long afterwards though.

“What’s the real reason you’re here so early?”

_I wanted to see you._ “That is the real reason.”

“You’ve got your ‘lying face’ on.”

“This is just my face!”

Lance grinned. He nudged Keith back. Again: lingering. Was everyone else asleep?

“Why do you come out here all the time?”

“Because I like the view.”

Keith had hoped, somewhere he hadn’t realized existed, that Lance’s response would involve him at least a little. He tried to squash his own disappointment at the answer.

He only said _oh_ and turned back to look out the window. The view was just as horrifying and humbling as ever. From the corner of his eye, he saw Lance move, shifting so his legs were crossed and his knee was brushing Keith’s. Lance only had an inch—at _most_ —over Keith, but it always felt like his limbs were so much longer. Every time they sat together, it felt like Lance was in a constant struggle to get comfortable, one he often seemed to lose.

That was a weird thing to notice maybe, Keith thought. That wasn’t something he would’ve cared about at the Garrison, about anybody. Lance hadn’t brought up how Keith had forgotten him since that conversation, but Keith thought again _I know you now. Shouldn’t that be enough? Can’t that make up for it?_

He wasn’t sure that it did, but some part of him wanted to blurt out every bit of Lance he’d picked up on the in the past six months, every habit and quirk and endearing trait that Keith would have never bothered noticing before, just as proof. _I’m not making this up. I_ know _you, more than I did at the Garrison._

And if they were separated today and met again in a year, Keith thought, this time, he would get the right answer.

 

\--

 

When they kissed for the first time, it was in front of that window. Keith thought about the hallway—but not the Garrison’s, not so long ago, not the memory of someone he’d never known. He thought about the castle’s hallways and someone in the corner of his eye, and he smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu on [tumblr](calliopin-around.tumblr.com) pls come talk to me abt klance i luv them....so much


End file.
